Greatest Challenge: Using data and research to determine whether
bias exists in Google's engineering-promotion process, helping Google create
better managers, and making onboarding and acculturation for new employees go faster.

Greatest Achievement: As head of PiLab, Brian uses employee
feedback and social science to help improve Google's culture and people
processes. He created "nudges" to encourage executives, managers and
new hires to be proactive in diversity, welcoming new employees and becoming
better managers.

Brian
Welle has always wanted to work in HR -- but not to oversee annual reviews or
open enrollment. He's more interested in what makes people tick. "I love the
human-behavior part of HR," he says.

While
pursuing a doctorate in industrial/organizational psychology at New York
University, he served as research director at Catalyst, a nonprofit firm that
promotes equality in the workplace. He credits Catalyst -- which, as a
nonprofit, had far fewer resources than a typical for-profit consulting firm --
with exposing him to much higher-level work than he would have gotten in a
conventional consulting role.

"Basically,
Catalyst throws you to the wolves, so you end up getting to do things there
that you would never get to do early on at a consulting firm," he says.

While
there, he worked on a project that surveyed women and other minorities about
their experiences working on Wall Street. Hearing about their struggles
reinforced his interest in workplace diversity and equality. Shortly
thereafter, Welle moved on to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he
did post-doctoral work examining the behaviors and personal characteristics of
successful leaders during public health and safety crises, such as 9/11.

Welle
considered a career in academia or at a think tank, but was worried that his
research would end up languishing in obscure journals that no one actually
reads. Then Google came calling, and he joined the company in 2006 as a member
of its people-analytics team.

Today,
Welle does head up a think tank of sorts: Google's People and Innovation Lab
(or PiLab), which he co-created. PiLab's mission is to use a combination of
employee feedback and social research to come up with ways to improve the
working experience at Google -- from job satisfaction to the corporate culture.

Welle
considers himself lucky to be in a unique situation in which he can conduct the
sort of deep research he'd be doing at a university and then apply his findings
to an actual enterprise -- in this case, one of the most innovative and
intriguing (not to mention deep-pocketed) companies in the world.

At
Google, Welle and his PiLab team have tackled such things as finding out why
there weren't more women leaders among the company's senior engineers. They set
out to determine whether or not a bias existed within Google's engineering
promotion process.

Here's
what they found: Men and women did, in fact, have an equal chance of being
promoted. But first, they had to self-nominate -- and this, Welles' team
discovered, was where the problem lay. Men, it turns out, were more likely than
women to nominate themselves for promotion. Welle came up with a solution that
was almost beautiful in its simplicity: Have senior leaders encourage women to
self-nominate for promotion. Sure enough, the gap was closed. "Often,
managers won't take note unless you nominate yourself," he says. "So
we asked [them] to send out regular reminders that say 'If you feel you're
ready, put yourself forward,' and that alone erased the gap."

Welle's
work has also included helping to improve the quality of Google's managers. The
company's Project Oxygen initiative had revealed the eight common behaviors of
effective people managers at Google. Now it was the job of Welle and his team
to not only apply those findings to how Google trains and develops its
managers, but to ensure they were showing results.

In
the summer of 2011, Welle's team got approval for nine standardized manager
items that would be used globally. It produced regular "pulse"
surveys of Googlers to rate their managers on the eight items and, for managers
whose results indicated they need work, provided access to a learning
curriculum to help them improve.

Newsletter Sign-Up:

Since
the surveys began, Google has seen consistent improvement in manager-survey
scores across the entire company.

Managerial
capabilities were also very much on Welle's mind as he contemplated another
challenge: getting the thousands of new Googlers (or "Nooglers," as
they're called) hired each year properly acculturated and productive as soon as
possible. One hurdle was managers: Between juggling all their other
duties, they sometimes overlooked basic tasks such as ensuring Nooglers were
assigned desks and computers, says Welle. "Obviously, not having these
things can be very disconcerting on your first day of work," he adds.

Working
with PiLab, Welle identified a series of simple "nudges" (small touch
points that can serve as prompts) to shape the behavior of Nooglers and their
managers in order to improve the onboarding process. The team experimented by
sending out an email to managers one week before their Nooglers started. It
addressed five things academic research had identified as drivers of successful
onboarding, from providing adequate resources to ensuring new employees are
matched up with a supportive colleague.

The
team compared the results of managers who'd been sent the nudges with those who
hadn't. Survey results showed that Nooglers whose managers had received the
nudges showed significantly more onboarding progress -- as rated by themselves
and their managers -- than those who hadn't.

Today,
a nudge is sent out each week to managers who are being assigned new employees.
Nooglers are also nudged into such things as setting up meetings with their
managers. "This has significantly impacted the experiences of Nooglers,
especially the ones who tend to be shy -- which is quite common among an
engineering staff," says Welle.

Welle's
efforts have earned him nothing but praise from his boss, Laszlo Bock, head of
Google's people operations. "Brian has really built up a reputation of
trust from Googlers that the people decisions made on their behalf are based on
data and meant for their own good," says Bock. "For those on his
team, he's always open to hearing new suggestions and really tries to create a
space where his team members feel free to run experiments and test their
ideas."